Contemporary large-scale land transactions (LSLTs), also called land grabs, are historically unprecedented in their scale and pace. They have provoked robust scholarly debates, yet studies of their gender-differentiated impacts remain more rare, particularly when it comes to how changes in control over land and resources affect women's labor, and thereby their livelihoods and well-being. Our comparative study of four LSLTs in western Ethiopia finds that the transactions led to substantial land use change, including relocation and decrease in size of smallholder parcels, loss of communally-held grazing lands, and loss of forests. These changes had far-reaching impacts on household labor allocation, the gendered division of labor, and household wellbeing. But their effects on women are both more adverse and more severe, expressed in terms of increased wage labor to make up for lost land and livestock, more time spent gathering firewood and water from increasingly distant locations, and an increased intensity of household responsibilities where male members underwent wage labor migration. These burdens led to negative psychological, corporal, and material effects on women living in and near transacted areas compared to their situation prior to transactions. This article both responds to the deficit in studies on the impacts of LSLTs on gendered livelihoods, labor relations, and wellbeing outcomes, and lays the groundwork for future research.
Abstract Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) has emerged as an important and cost-effective climate change mitigation strategy internationally. In many localities around the world, REDD+ and related interventions have been superimposed on, and overlap with, existing decentralized institutional arrangements such as community forests. These interventions often modify local institutions through new rules and practices that comply with mostly carbon-related objectives, prompting questions about the compatibility of a top-down mechanism such as REDD+ with the decentralized approaches of community forestry. Thus, we asked: are REDD+ interventions in community forests enhancing or detracting from communities’ abilities to practice adaptive management and governance—key desired components of local social-ecological resilience and the ability of communities to respond to disturbance and global change? We conducted a systematic review of studies examining REDD+ interventions in community forests. We extracted data on 59 case studies reported on in 43 articles, stemming from 14 countries, with two thirds of the cases located in two countries alone. Our meta-analysis found that REDD+ has had mixed impacts on communities’ social-ecological resilience. Increases in network ties, connectivity across scales, and increased participation in decision making are indicators of enhanced potential for local adaptability. However, we also see that, through restrictions on local forest practices, rigidity in rules, and communities’ natural capital being locked into carbon contracts, REDD+ has limited communities’ ability to manage for uncertainty. While not representative of all existing REDD+ projects, our results suggest important implications for REDD+ policymakers and forest-reliant communities engaging in REDD+. Reconciling REDD+ goals with the need for forest communities to retain adaptive capacity will be a challenge moving forward, particularly if REDD+ compromises the ability of forest-reliant communities to respond to unexpected shocks or their ability to adapt to changing environmental or economic conditions.
The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development’s (UNCED) Rio Declaration and Statement of principles for the sustainable management of forests were adopted in 1992, with the objective of initiating sustainable forest management (SFM) to ensure conservation and maintenance of ecosystem services while still allowing for continual use of forests for economic, social and cultural purposes. Since then many other Criteria and Indicator (C&I) frameworks have been developed, reflecting the growing worldwide demand for socially and environmentally responsible forestry. Much research has been devoted to designing and refining appropriate C&Is to reflect the particular ecological, socio-cultural, economic and political characteristics of distinct forests. This work has expanded the definition of SFM and facilitated monitoring of local management actions. However, increased decentralization of forestry governance and the rise of community forestry worldwide in the past decade are rapidly transforming the face of forestry and forest services across local and international scales. In light of this trend, we revisit current C&I frameworks – which have been based on fixed expectations and measurements of stable processes against past conditions – to ask: are they still relevant? In this paper we present an analysis of case studies where this change is occurring. Within each case study, we seek to identify the limits of current C&I frameworks for addressing the shifting trends and dynamic processes that affect forest management outcomes. Recommendations for adapting current C&I frameworks are discussed.
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